A New Approach to Treating Baffle/Reflector Heterogeneity in AFEN Methodology

In this paper, an effective method for resolving difficulty resulting from the heterogeneity of the PWR baffle/reflector region is developed on the basis of the AFEN method. The essential difference of the new method from the conventional approach based on the equivalence theory is that the heterogeneous baffle/reflector is directly, without homogenization, considered as a node in nodal calculation Numerical results show that AFEN method with the new method can accurately predict both the multiplication factor and the power distribution of thermal reactors with baffle explicitly modeled.